The Peasant and the Bear
Daniel Cowling

Vienna, 1 January 1953. American Vice-consul Edward Harper walked hurriedly towards a car parked outside the state opera house. Just as he reached for the door handle, Harper was interrupted by a short, squat man in civilian clothing. ‘Entschuldigung’, he uttered in halting, heavily accented German, ‘Wo ist die amerikanische Kommission für Österreich?’ Ever the diplomat, Harper offered his interlocutor a ride - but the man demurred and abruptly handed him a sealed envelope before bolting off across the square. Inside, Harper found a note in Cyrillic which read ‘I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services.’

This is the opening gambit of one of the Cold War’s most pivotal but little known spy stories. Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a disgruntled Russian peasant who had become a senior Soviet intelligence officer, was offering his cloak-and-dagger services to the CIA. For the next six years, Popov was the first and only Soviet agent working for American intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain. Under the watchful eye of his enigmatic case officer, George ‘Bear’ Kisevalter, Popov cracked open the Soviet intelligence establishment and provided vital intel on military preparations, espionage plots, and secret technologies. It is no exaggeration to say that these earth-shattering revelations helped avoid the outbreak of World War III. From encounters with British double agent George Blake to first-hand stories of daring tradecraft on the streets of Manhattan, this is a true spy story as dramatic as any fiction.

 The Peasant and the Bear takes readers to the frontlines of the Cold War: we follow Popov and Kisevalter from shadowy Viennese safehouses and clandestine meetings in Berlin to the Soviet double agent’s final, fateful days in Moscow. In October 1959, Popov was caught attempting to deliver a secret message to his American handler. The KGB executed Popov as a traitor - and his sudden demise left many in the CIA wondering if their star agent was betrayed from within. It prompted a frenzied search for a Soviet mole that pushed the CIA to the brink. This legacy of paranoia changed the course of the Cold War forever: after Popov no-one was to be trusted. 

Thanks to a tranche of newly-declassified CIA documents it is now possible to tell this exhilarating real-life spy thriller in full for the first time. The Peasant and the Bear is a narrative history that disentangles layers of deception and suspicion to reveal one of the most remarkable hidden chapters of the Cold War.